Searching for the "Right" Home

I tend toward obsessiveness. Mostly it serves me well, as long as I retain the ability to turn it off when other demands intervene.

I was obsessive about house hunting.  I went on realtor.com several times a day, looking for new posts. I quickly learned that Batavia is full of very old, large homes with multiple bedrooms and only one bathroom.  These are generally inexpensive and often in need of a great deal of “work”.  After cruising past several of them, I determined that, though affordable, these were “too much house” for me.  I could not imagine cleaning them or heating them.  I would need a smaller ranch or perhaps a Cape Cod.

I expanded my search to neighboring towns… Byron, Bergen, Oakfield, Elba, LeRoy, though I soon took these off the table. Besides wanting to be close to my brother’s house, I didn’t want a run to Walmart or Home Depot to be a major undertaking. Every weekend I was in town, my friend, Mary and I met my realtor and saw a few properties. We were often disappointed by our visits. Outdated kitchens. No dining room. Oddly designed bathrooms. Cobbled together storage in cobbled together bedrooms.  No garage. Detached garage.  Ill-conceived additions.   Animal smells.

There were a couple I anguished over before rejecting. One of them was on the same road I grew up on and was sandwiched between the former homes of two of my best girlfriends from school. Wouldn’t that be kind of a ‘meant to be’ situation?? The downstairs was really cute and modern with some nice touches, including a fire place. But it was floor to ceiling windows in both dining and living rooms and try as I might, I could not imagine where any of my furniture would go as there were no walls that were usable.  And the upstairs bedrooms had very odd storage arrangements, including windows that had been blocked out to accommodate closets.

I made lists:

Pros                                          Cons

Location                                    No usable walls
Big yard                                     Detached garage
Modern kitchen                         Upstairs bedrooms a mess
Lots of windows                        No entryway
Hardwood floors                       Over my budget

Ultimately, I had to admit that the emotional draw to a home on Clinton Street was the primary reason that this house was in contention. Any other location and I would have rejected it for all of the cons instantly. I moved on.

We usually took my brother David with us on these adventures. He didn’t understand why we were looking at houses, but he always brought his camera along to take pictures. I thought this might be useful until I realized that the aspects he focused on and photographed were not in line with what I would want to recall.   As Mary and I were developing my list of “must-haves” – attached garage, hardwood floors, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, dining room, fireplace, usable and big enough yard, dry and usable basement, close to town – his requirements included an American flag and a large flat screen television. 

When I saw my River Street home on realtor.com, I emailed my agent immediately. She knew the home. It has belonged to a former colleague of hers who had relocated to Florida in retirement. We immediately scheduled a time for me to see it on the coming weekend. It was love at first sight. Everything about this house was right.  Not too big, but not too small. Without repeating myself, it had every single item on my must-have list. Even the price felt within the range of fair. My agent said, “I knew you would like this.” I started to feel anxious – was anyone else looking at the house? Were they interested? Had an offer been made? What did she think? She was honest – she advised me not to wait too long.

Back at home in Hartsdale, I couldn’t get the house out of my head. I was afraid to let it go, afraid to assume I would find something else equally as good. But I wanted the opinions of other people who had more experience with home-owning than I. I arranged to return just a few days later and asked my friends, Tom and Jim, to come see it and render their assessment. They both gave it the ‘thumbs up.’  I put in an offer on Nov 12 at 10 a.m. By 1 p.m., we had a counter-offer, and five short weeks later, the magic words – ‘cleared to close.’